Incoherent Supreme Court Renders Constitution Meaningless

Jun 27, 2005

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I guess it’s fair and accurate to say today that the Constitution is meaningless. The Constitution must not mean anything. It must not stand for anything. I guess the Constitution can be bent and shaped to represent the personal policy preferences of at least five people on the US Supreme Court. Greetings, and welcome. Great to be back. Boy, it seems like I’ve been gone two weeks all that’s gone on since I was not here, but we’re back and ready to go here in the prestigious Attila the Hun Chair of the distinguished Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. I am Rush Limbaugh, America’s anchorman, America’s Truth Detector, and general all-around good guy combined here in one harmless, lovable little fuzzball. Now, if you want to be on the program today, feel free. The telephone number is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, Rush@eibnet.com. I swear, folks, it was a live American freak show this morning. It was a veritable freak show, because as the Supreme Court is issuing its two rulings on the Ten Commandments, the BTK killer is in a courtroom where you cannot have the Ten Commandments. One of those, by the way, for those on the American left, one of those Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not kill.” And so the court today says you can’t post those inside a courthouse but you can post them outside. You know why they did that? Because they don’t want to tear down their own display at the US Supreme Court. That’s the only reason. If they ruled against Texas then they would have had to tear down their own display and who knows what other displays they have at the US Supreme Court. So you can have the Ten Commandments outside a government building, but you can’t put them in a courthouse, and yet inside the courthouse we had this BTK killer offering the grisly detail of how he murdered ten people. This court is incoherent, folks. I have to tell you, I got up every morning when I was away and I would go through the news. When I saw that decision on property rights in New London, Connecticut, I said, “And people say this is a conservative court!” Let me tell you a little story. I went to a dinner party on Saturday night, and it was up in Southport, Connecticut, and the people up there, the conservatives up there are depressed like you can’t believe. You people think you’re down in the dumps; you ought to go up there. These people are surrounded by liberals everywhere. They’re surrounded by liberal academe. They have no sense of the conservative progress that’s being made. They really don’t, or very little. Their news of the day is the New York Times. Their kids come home from these Ivy League schools and tell them what a bunch of garbage they’re being taught every day and they’re literally down in the dumps. I had to do a Norman Vincent Peale. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there; I’m doing a buck ’em up session at dinner on Saturday night, because they’re just totally down in the dumps. And this decision came up on property rights. One of the people at the dinner party said, “You know, I run into liberals all the time. They’re not nearly as wacko as the fringe Democrat kooks are, but they still say they’re Democrats because–” and I hear this constantly, “–because the Democrats are for the little guy. Liberals are for the little guy.”I said, “Really? Well, let’s look at this Supreme Court decision on the fact that little guys don’t have property rights anymore.” Folks, this is unbelievable. Now, the Constitution requires or allows the government to take your property with just compensation if they’re going to build a road or something. But it doesn’t allow one group of private citizens to take your property for another group of private citizens so that the government can profit with a higher tax base. It does now. That’s the thing. It didn’t allow that. What happened in New London, Connecticut, was that a bunch of people, middle class, lower class people, still somehow managing to live on the waterfront there, basically have now lost their homes. A big developer wants to come in, raze those homes and put up a giant shopping center and office park and all of that, and the state of Connecticut said, “Yip yip yip yip yahoo!” We’re going to get more tax revenue from this new development than we’ll get from these middle class people and their little homes down there and so that’s what this case was about. The US Supreme Court found that it’s okay for one group of citizens to take the property of another group of citizens if the government will benefit from tax revenue. So what’s the lesson? The lesson here is not that the left cares about you, the little guy; it’s not that Democrats care about you, the little guy. It is they care about big government. If anything is going to benefit government anybody can get screwed, and that’s exactly what happened in this ruling, and I just have to laugh when I hear people say, “Is the current court a conservative court, or a moderate court?” Well, forget what you hear from the Chuck Schumers and the dissemblers at MoveOn.org. When you look at this seizing private property for private good decision, let me just tell you how a conservative court would vote unanimously nine to nothing.

If there were nine conservatives on this court it would have been nine-to-nothing. “No way. The government does not get to take somebody’s private property in order to have somebody else that’s a private citizen build something else there.” A moderate court, who knows what a moderate court would do, 7-2, 8-1, but still find against the State of Connecticut on this. A moderately left-leaning court might vote 5-4 but still in favor of the private property owners. But this court? This court voted yes 5-4 and this is called an extreme right-wing court? Chuck Schumer, may your house be seized for the public good someday? Hey, folks, there’s a piece of property that could revive the town of Hyannisport that I’ve got on my mind here, could increase the tax base of the town for public good — except that’s not what’s going to happen. The Chuck Schumers and the Ted Kennedys and all of the rest of the upper class, they’re not going to have their homes taken. It’s going to be the little guy. It’s going to be the little guy that the Democrats claim to represent, that the left claims to represent. It’s going to be the little guy that still votes for these people because they’re out there representing them and standing with the little guy. It’s the little guy whose property is going to be taken. Now for whatever reason — not that government needs it — a private citizen can say, “I want to build a development there,” and the government come in and say, “I’m going to join you in this because I’ll get more tax revenue from this.” I mean, the irony of this ruling is the timing. Just when the left– this is another thing. I’m getting so fed up watching television today. The press, everybody is so disappointed there was no retirement announced today. Let me tell you something, folks. The justices seldom — it’s happened, but it is seldom that justices announce retirements from the bench on the final day. It’s not unusual we haven’t had a retirement today. We may get one later today. The way these things generally happen, later today or later in the week, you know, whoever retires will send a letter up to the president and that’s that. Until then, nobody knows. But all these people (crying). “No retirement! that’s what we really want. We want a Supreme Court fight. That’s what we want.” That’s what the press wants. That’s what everybody wants, a Supreme Court fight. So they’re all down in the dumps there was no retirement today. But there’s going to be at some point, there’s going to be a Supreme Court retirement, and here we have — just when the left is out there wailing and whining and moaning about an extreme right-wing court — we get this decision on private property rights out of Connecticut. Ruth Bader Rodham — sorry — Ruth “Buzzi” Ginsburg, ultra-liberal, ultra-ACLU, but in the showdown of civil liberties and private property, guess what won out with her? Expanding the power of government. That’s what won out with all of the libs on the court, and I, frankly, was stunned to see this. I never thought that I would see this day, I really didn’t. We haven’t even gotten to Karl Rove here, and I’ve got three hours today to recap stuff that happened last week and talk about today’s decisions. But what can a little guy now do? If you’re a little guy out there and you have a desirable piece of property that some big developer wants. “Rush, are you actually speaking against big developers? I thought you were conservative.” This is my point, folks. I’m speaking in favor of property rights. I don’t think it’s right that one group of people should be able to go to the government and have somebody else’s property taken from them. It’s not the government taking, it’s a private citizen, and the government’s only interest is increased tax revenue. What can you little people do? The first thing you can do is stop voting Democrat for one. Wake up and smell the roses and the coffee and understand that the people you claim are looking out for you, representing you, are screwing you literally blind here to the point that you’re not going to have property if somebody else has their eyes on it. See, lawmakers, Congress can be overridden with a veto; a president can be overridden with a veto, override. But how do you veto the Supreme Court, how do you override it? Well, there are ways, but nobody’s got the guts to do it anymore. So what’s a little guy to do here? What’s a little guy to do? Well, I’ll tell you what you should do. We’re a land of visuals. We’re a land where pictures are what form opinions. So if you are a little guy and it happens to you, some big entity come along and has designs on your property, put sandbags around your homes, put barbed wire around your homes, start wearing World War I or World War II helmets, go out and grab a rifle with some bayonets, maybe get some machine guns with those hand-guided belts of bullets, just put them — It can be fake; it doesn’t matter — and then have your grandmother up there at the top of the sandbags bearing a musket or something with three kids bearing a flag that says don’t tread on me. You’re going to have to do it that way because you can’t… It’s uncanny. You cannot rely on the courts of this country to interpret the Constitution properly. It may as well be meaningless, and this incoherence on the Ten Commandments cases today is just mind-boggling. BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: What can we do to change the court? There is a way. You can amend the Constitution. And, frankly, this is the way to go about it. Amend the Constitution to give the Congress power to override Supreme Court decisions by a two-thirds majority vote of both houses. Amending the Constitution is a very hard thing to do, purposely so, and it ought to be hard to amend the Constitution, but, you know, we’re getting to a point here where the Supreme Court is so all powerful and unchecked that it’s a process somebody is going to have to start considering. This property thing, I mean, you can talk about the Ten Commandments all day. That is just incoherent, but this property rights business — and then when you look at the New York Times… The New York Times, all these liberal publications, are happy about it. They were ecstatic about it. What does that tell you? I’ll tell you something else the New York Times is happy about, or unhappy about. You know, George Pataki and a number of people have risen up and said what is it that these left-wing wackos — my words, not theirs — are trying to do the 9/11 memorial? “What in the world do we have to do? Why do we have to turn this into a hate-America memorial? That’s not what happened there,” and the New York Times is all upset that somebody doesn’t want to allow “the full scope, the breadth and scope of the American conversation or the American experience to be on display at the memorial site of the World Trade Center rebuild.” So here you’ve got the New York Times, the paper of the little guy — and they’re not. They’re the paper of the elites, and they prove it agreeing with this ruling. In fact, they don’t even like the whole concept of property rights — and I’ll tell you why, folks. You know, you talk about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, free speech and all that, and people say, “That’s key to a free society.” Let me tell you what I think is as fundamental, if not more so, and that is the right to own property and if you don’t have the right to own property, if the government has come in and take what you have? The law of the land is you own what you own, what you own is yours. If somebody can just come in and take it from you under the guise of government benefiting, I’m sorry, folks, but we don’t have a constitutional representative republic in that circumstance. And when you’ve got newspapers like the New York Times writing derogatorily of the whole concept of property rights, my friends, you’re getting dangerously close to a strain here of Marxism and socialism that is scary. It just really is. To write derogatorily and smearingly and snivelingly of the concept of the property rights, it’s just over the top, and I’ll guarantee you that nine out of ten times, whatever the government ends up doing with your property is going to end up being a boondoggle. It’s going to end up being an embarrassment. It’s going to be wasting away and rusted in ten years. It’s just like some of these public housing projects that have been built all over the country that are now eyesores and an embarrassment. You know, waterfront land goes first, too, because that’s what everybody wants. I think even the turtles might be screwed in this one. I think the liberals might even say, “Screw the sea turtles and their nesting regions on the beach,” because you’re not going to stop the private property owners the government approves of. They are going to provide all this tax revenue from building what it is that’s going to generate the tax revenue. Lets talk about the Ten Commandments display. This is just simply incoherent. The first thing is, the Constitution does not prevent the public display of the Ten Commandments, period. It doesn’t prevent it. Now if you want to display these things in public, you’re going to have a similar display of secular materials as well just to satisfy everybody. Here’s how the AP writes about this today: “A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday upheld the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on government land, but drew the line on displays inside courthouses saying those violate the doctrine of separation of church and state.” See, according to this court, the Ten Commandments outside a government building is part of our natural history and history of evolution, history of the law of the country. But you put them inside and all of a sudden they become a religious display. That is what the court said. “Each exhibit demands scrutiny to determine whether it goes too far in amounting to a governmental promotion of religion, the court said in a case involving Kentucky courthouse exhibits. In effect, the Supreme Court said that it was taking the position that issues of Ten Commandments displays in courthouses should be resolved on a case-by-case basis. But in a 5-4 ruling and another decision involving the positioning of a six-foot granite monument of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas capitol, justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote, the second ruling likewise by a 5-4 margin. Justice Scalia released a stinging dissent in the courthouse case. He wrote, ‘What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.’ The justices voting on the prevailing side in the Kentucky case left themselves legal wiggle room, saying that some displays inside courthouses would be permissible if they’re portrayed neutrally in order to honor the nation’s legal history. But framed copies in two Kentucky courthouses went too far in endorsing religion, the court held. Those courthouse displays are unconstitutional, the justices said, because their religious content is overemphasized.”What are we going to do about going into court now and placing your hand on the Bible and swearing to tell the truth? (Laughing.) This is just as incoherent as it can be, and I’ll just tell you one other thing: I think the only reason they split the baby here is because they don’t want to have to get rid of their own displays. They got their own displays of the Ten Commandments. They’ve got their own displays of other artifacts of American history. They don’t want to have to get rid of their own things, they don’t want to have to turn their own building over to scrutiny, and so they’ve cut themselves some slack by ruling as they did in the Texas case. So that’s pretty much it. The Supreme Court made some other common sense rulings. I think they sent the Internet file-sharing case back to the lower court for trial. That means that these ftp sites, file sharing sites can be sued if they allow this peer-to-peer file transferring, person-to-person in other words, for the purpose of beating copyright laws, and that’s a common sense ruling. I mean, that one makes sense. What else did the idiots do here today? Well, cable service. That one makes sense, too, the cable companies don’t have to give up their lines to other competitors.END TRANSCRIPT